<p>How much of a difference does not reporting class rank make?</p>
<p>My school is a top school in the country, and we're not reporting class rank for the first time officially this year. We're a small magnet school and we draw from a very large district, so admissions are selective. Many of the students are my school would be top ranked students at their home school. </p>
<p>Since we aren't reporting rank, is it likely that students will do much better in college applications this year? Further, will colleges "assign" ranks to students based on historical data, and use those to gauge where the applicant is in the class?</p>
<p>I dont think it will make much of a difference. </p>
<p>The only issue I can think of is sometimes scholarships can be hung off of class rank. For ex they may offer money to students with X gpa or top X% of class. If you dont rank they will only use GPA.</p>
<p>The article is 5 years old, so I imagine today more than half of high schools no longer provide ranking or have guidance counselor’s check those boxes on the Secondary School Report (SSR). </p>
<p>That said, when a high school does not provide rank, a college can simply put all the applications it receives from each high school in GPA order to determine ranking. So colleges have access to ranking even when high schools do not provide that information.</p>
<p>A lot of reputable high schools don’t rank their students because the parents really dislike it. They do, however, do a lot of ‘undercover’ ranking via the school counselors. </p>
<p>Our HS does not rank but for colleges, the guidance counselors are able to provide information (if a college requires it) as to where the student falls within the percentile spectrum of his or her class (e.g., top 5%, top 10%). Thank goodness people are now realizing that ranking has partly contributed to our “race to nowhere.” Ranking often results in students declining to take certain challenging courses because they might “hurt their rank” or they take too heavy of a weighted courseload thinking it is better because then they get the “extra weights.” They often fail to take a course that might be really interesting simply because it may be too difficult or not weighted, even though the course is really something they want to take. Lastly, some schools (especially larger public schools) offer a type of tracking system beginning in 9th grade --which means that in one school, a student might have 4 or 5 of their 9th grade academic classes being in “weighted” honors classes, while a student in another equally as challenging school could have the option of NO honors classes. So the student at high school one could have an inflated weighted GPA… Sorry to ramble…</p>